If we agree that the goal of public innovation is to create public value (PV), we then have to decide whom is going to decide what PV is, and how it should be decided. Moore (1995) in “Creating public value” seems to give the managers the responsibility, and in “Recognizing public value” (2013) he is trying to establish objective standards for how to decide it.
However - Innovations in the public sphere are always part of the political struggle in society, and decisions will be evaluated from different perspectives; they can be an improvement for some and to the worse for others. In our political systems, public bodies are elected to take decisions about what gives most PV, and they have the authority to do so. Nevertheless, different actors may disagree because they give priority to different values. At the individual level, we will have a similar situation.
Within a service-dominant logic perspective value is supposed to be co-created between service providers and service receivers, based on the contextual experience of the interaction (Vargo & Lusch, 2006). If the interaction may co-create value, it may also co-destruct value. It can be intended because they disagree, but the outcome can also be different from what both parts expected. Quite often service receivers will have to interact with several providers, who can disagree and destruct the positive value-creation of each other’s efforts. For the service receivers the interaction and innovations can have a dark side (Williams, Kang, & Johnson, 2016). One example is the digitalisation of the relations between public services and their “customers” (users), as described in Ken Loach`s movie “I, Daniel Blake” where Blake is a digital illiterate.
The paper aims at elaborating a typology of the dark sides of innovations in interactions between service providers and receivers in public sector, and by this illustrating that co-creation of value also is a struggle between conflicting interests.
Moore, M. H. (1995). Creating public value: Strategic management in government: Harvard university press. Moore, M. H. (2013). Recognizing public value: Harvard University Press. Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2006). Service-dominant logic. Armonk, NY: M.I. Sharpe. Williams, B. N., Kang, S.-C., & Johnson, J. (2016). (Co)-Contamination as the Dark Side of Co-Production: Public value failures in co-production processes. Public Management Review, 18(5), 692-717.
